You know you want to talk about it . . .

Main menu

Creative Team

Team Elephant consists of:

Andy Uehara

Andy Uehara is a graduate student in the Interactive Media program at the University of Southern California. In the past, Andy threw grenades and screamed obscenities in the United States Marine Corps. Andy is interested in the intersection of play, education, and technology. He is the co-creator of the Combiform gaming platform (www.facebook.com/Combiform). Combiform uses custom game controllers that are designed to break down the invisible wall between players interacting together. Andy also co-developed Combiform Shooter, a game built on the Combiform platform, which was a semi-finalist at the 2010 Adobe Design Achievement Awards. Combiform Shooter is a shoot’em up that allows players to experience their fantasy as the Mighty Morphin Power Rangers. Recently Andy designed another game for the Combiform platform, Bisho Bisho Bailout, which won the Most Innovative Game award and was runner-up for the Best in Show award at the 2010 Meaningful Play Conference. In Bisho Bisho Bailout, players must cooperate to fight the rising tide by physically combining their controllers and jointly directing the movement and actions of their characters.

Casey China

Casey China is a public health professional with interest in the potential for games to improve individual and population health, including the physical, psychological and social environment factors that impact health and well-being. Her previous work includes Health Detective, a game introducing students to field epidemiology and the steps of disease outbreak investigation, for which she was co-creator, including game design, artist, and public health advisor. She was level designer for Fox Sokoban, a multi-player clone of theSokoban puzzle game, and game artist for Japanese Numbers Banzai!, a program designed to teach children Japanese numbers through auditory and visual recognition. Casey graduated from Brown University with a BA in Psychology and completed her Master of Public Health degree at the University of Washington.

Michael Annetta

Michael Annetta is a cross-media artist with a background in theatre, film, television, as an actor, singer, director, producer, and art director. He holds a BA from Penn State University in Film, with Honors in Theatre, and has completed the classical actor’s training program at the National Shakespeare Conservatory in New York City. He holds an MFA in Interactive Media from USC’s School of Cinematic Arts. His research in interactive media research extends beyond the conventional definition of video gaming to include work in the emerging fields of serious/educational gaming, public interactives and responsive environments, interactive data visualization, alternate reality games and other real-world experience design. He is a founding member of the School of Cinematic Art’s Stereo3D lab and, along with Joshua McViegh-Schultz, a member of USC’s Mobile and Environmental Media Lab, working on the intersection of technology and human interfaces. Michael is the first-ever recipient of the USC Lambda LGBT Alumni Association’s NOGLSTP (National Organization of Gay and Lesbian Scientists and Technical Professionals) Scholarship in Innovation. He sits on the advisory board for The Lavender Effect, a not-for-profit foundation formed to celebrate LGBTQ heritage and committed to creating a state-of-the-art LGBTQ museum and cultural center that will be among the foremost educational and entertainment institutions in Southern California. he is the current Program Director of TransmediaLA. Examples of his work include several of USC’s MFA Interactive Media Division Showcases (2010: Singularities, Producer; 2011: Out of Control-ler, Marketing; 2011: First Move, Co-Curator), a storytelling game (Rain of the Gods), an educational math game (Zooples in Space!), an interactive morality and ethics exploration (Puddinheads) and his graduate thesis, Seymour Deeply, a transmedia exploration of the use of stereoscopic 3D as a storytelling tool in interactive media.

Joshua McVeigh-Schultz

Joshua McVeigh-Schultz is an artist, designer, and scholar. His work reimagines the performative affordances of everyday rituals. He completed an MA in Asian Studies at UC Berkeley and an MFA at UC Santa Cruz’s Digital Arts and New Media program. For his MFA thesis project he designed a crowdsourced interview tool (Synaptic Crowd) that enables online participants to conduct collaborative on-the-street interviews without having to be on the street. He is currently earning a PhD in Media Arts and Practice at the University of Southern California. He also works as a researcher for the Institute for Multimedia Literacy’s TeachingwithDigitalMedia professional development program (helping K12 instructors to introduce multimedia tools and design-based learning into the classroom). He is a member of Henry Jenkins’sCivic Paths research group, studying new models of political engagement at the intersection of civics and pop-culture, and a designer in Scott Fisher’sMobileandEnvironmental ResearchLab, where he develops speculative interactive experiences for built environments and vehicles of the future. Recent work includes Please Call Me, an interactive installation that solicits calls and delivers playful instructions through a surveilled phone. He also co-designed an alternative reality game called Dendritix where players, communicating over mobile phones, work to uncover elusive interdimensional gnomes by exploring a networked (text-based) virtual world, as they navigate physical space looking for clues.